DEMO: ActionFlow takes the pain out of running a business

ActionFlow is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

The startup ActionFlow aims to make it easier to run a business by offering company owners and managers inexpensive business-process templates to define, automate, and simplify tasks most businesses encounter.

Some companies pay expensive consultants to offer business-process advice, but not everyone can afford that luxury. ActionFlow offers over 50 different business processes for $49 each, which companies can tweak to suit their needs.

After logging into the site, users can find processes related to strategy, marketing, sales, customer service, human resources, social media, finance, and more. According to the company, each task includes instructions, responsibilities, due dates, checklists, attachments, links and comments. The site also allows users to create their own business-process templates, and make them available for review and purchase by other users.

ActionFlow competes with task-management services like Remember the Milk, and project management offerings like 37signals’ Basecamp. None of its competitors offer business processes for sale, however, and the larger project-management services are generally too expensive to compete on the same level.

The Oeiras, Portugal-based company was founded in 2009, and currently has 8 employees. The company is privately funded by its founder, Antonio Lucena de Faria, who has invested $318,000 in seed capital.

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